WFF4CDFZMG
MESESGGDLC
Using the same system, the best he could do with the second line was “Jurgen’s rig is QQ I’ve messes GDLC.” Not much help.
Dividing the letters into clumps of four and reading each backward across the top, forward across the bottom, gave him “Me Jo, U jug,” followed by gibberish, and the word “this,” just as plain; then drivel again.
He tried reading the whole sequence backward. Then he tried to break it as if it were a simple substitution code; but this was going too far. Jones gave it up.
HE went back to his story and actually wrote a paragraph before another idea came to him.
Even if you assumed that some typos were market tips from the Moon, or hiccups of the subconscious, or whatever, you had to figure that some typos were typos. “W” for “s,” now— perfectly natural mistake. But “w” for “j,” say—all the way across the keyboard—would be something else again.
On the typewriter keyboard, Jones discovered, “J” was directly under “U.” He crossed the two letters out. Five more pairs went the same way, leaving a string of typos which, when you came to think of it, were pretty odd—like “E” for “J”—different fingers, different hand, different row of keys.
He stared at what he had left:
Something about the bottom lines struck his attention. Under it, he wrote:
JONS RISIV MESSG DLC
JONES RECEIVE MESSAGE DLC
He blinked. “Be taking up Yoga next,” he muttered. “Automatic writing. Old ladies at stances.”
But, of course, he was hooked. It was that irresolvable “DLC” on the end that did it. “DLC” what? Doll carts, dull caddy, dollars and cents?
He reached blindly to the shelf over his desk, hauled down a book, opened it beside his typewriter and began transcribing. His fingers were nervous. He was making a lot of mistakes, he knew, but he didn’t try to do any better; he just kept banging away, eyes fixed on the open book, breathing in little agonized snorts through his nose.
He slammed the line-space lever and the paper tilted out of the machine; he was at the bottom of the page. He took the paper almost angrily, smoothed it out, began listing errors.
After a few minutes, this is what he had:
JONS OBE OBE OBEI DLC JONES OBEY OBEY OBEY DLC
He got drunk all over again, sobered up and wrote a letter to Wallace in care of the New York office. He wrote the letter in longhand—four pages of it—and sent it off before he had a chance to lose his nerve.
JONES did not touch the typewriter again for almost a week, in spite of two sharp arguments with his wife, until the letter came from Wallace:
Hotel Imperial
Deadwood, Ariz.
Dear Fred,
Well, you’re right and I apologize for several things that occurred to me when I got your letter.
I am absolutely bowled over, but will try to get some first impressions down.
Your letter arrived Thursday. Friday night, I had just finished a piece and I tried your system on it, feeling seven kinds of a fool This emerged: Wals (me) cntakt derm. (Darkroom?) Not the best spelling, but the parallel with your message is impossible to ignore, and of course there is no way on Earth you could have engineered this, so I am stuck with the thing.
Now pay close attention, please.
1. I have no recollection of proposing this or any other theory of typos to you on that evening. I know I was well along, but I always remember the next morning. Either you’re mistaken or—well, let’s move along.
2. I took the trouble to examine typescripts by three other newsmen I met here; there was nothing in them. Has it struck you that even if one of us should demonstrate this thing, by typing an unfamiliar text in the presence of observers, they’d be able to say we had memorized the message beforehand and deliberately made the required errors?
I don’t mean that we couldn’t get a hearing—nothing easier with a crackpot hypothesis like this, as you know—but that we’d convince nobody who’d be worth the trouble of convincing.
Later: It comes down to this, that we have either got to drop the thing now—and do you really see yourself doing that, turning out tons of copy between now & your 80th birthday and wondering all the while what grisly mysteries are concealed in the typos?—or else we are both of us going to wind up listing to starboard, two bonnets with but a single bee. If you see any way out that I’ve overlooked, speak up.
Still later: Have just been through several of my old scripts, a thing which has probably occurred to you, too, by now. There is nothing in them; nothing in anything until just last week. I don’t like this. I don’t like it in the least
Why us?
(In pencil) To save you the trouble, the typos in this letter spell out: Wlas (me again) fil fil be be
I haven’t the slightest idea what it may mean, but for some reason it bothers me more than the other one.
I keep thinking of that “derm” and it reminds me of Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday”— do you know it?—that terrifying business about the giant who turned out to be giving everybody their orders, anarchists and policemen alike, while sitting in a pitch dark room.
Feel feel be be. I’ve got a headache. Write when you can.
Best,
Walt
THE following morning, Jones went uptown to the offices of the news service for which he did most of his work. As a freelance feature writer, he should have gone to the Reading Room of the New York Public Library instead, but he had ancient privileges and felt more at home in the news service’s compact reference library.
He looked in the Unabridged first, then in the Dictionary of Abbreviations.
He found no D. L. C. and no D. C. R. M.
D. L. S. was Doctor of Library Science. Jones snorted. Or if you inverted it, D. C. L. was Doctor of Civil Law. There was a C. R. O. M., meaning Coniederacio Regional Obrera Mexicana; you could put a D. on the front to stand for Director …
What if they were phonetic spellings, though? Everything else in the “messages” was DLC and DCRM. Dulcie and uh—Decorum. Dulcie and Decorum! He felt a quickening of interest. That meant something, if only—
Phil Mann shuffled into the room and stood quietly watching him, comfortably paunchy in a knit sports shirt, pipe in his hand. Jones looked up.
“Find it?”
“No,” said Jones abstractedly. Now what the devil was it that he’d been on the verge of?
Mann glanced at the dictionary on the table. “If it’s abbreviations you want, that guy out there is your man.”
“Yeah?”
“Sure. I think you met him once. Sam Fowler. Does crossword puzzles for the Trib. Any cockeyed combinations of letters, he knows.”
Fowler was pudgy and fat-lipped; his eyes were enormous behind swimmy lenses. He gazed at the ceiling, stroking his chin. “D. L. C.,” he said. “Doctor of Literary—Doctor of Library— Nup. D. C. R. M. Hmm …” He shook his head.
“I didn’t think so,” said Jones. “It was just a—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.”
Fowler shook a fat palm at him and went on staring at the ceiling. He shifted on the edge of the desk, moved his lips once or twice, sniffed, and went on staring.
Mann wandered over to look at one of the softly clicking teletype machines and wandered back again.
At last Fowler said, “Only thing I can think of—don’t know whether it’ll help you—”